Microfoundations of Social Capital
Publikation: Working paper › Forskning
We show that the standard trust question routinely used in social capital research is importantly related to cooperation behavior and we provide a microfoundation for this relation. We run a large-scale public goods experiment over the internet in Denmark and find that the trust question is a proxy for cooperation preferences rather than beliefs about others’ cooperation. To disentangle the preference and belief channels, we run a (standard) public goods game in which beliefs matter for cooperation choices and one (using the strategy method) in which they do not matter. We show that the “fairness question”, a recently proposed alternative to the “trust question”, is also related to cooperation behavior but operates through beliefs rather than preferences.
Originalsprog | Engelsk |
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DOI | |
Status | Udgivet - 22 okt. 2009 |
Navn | Univ. of Copenhagen Dept. of Economics Discussion Paper |
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Nummer | 09-24 |
ID: 241647347